


You've Been Burned, Well So Have I

by clotpolesonly



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alpha Laura Hale, Apologies, But He Gets Better, Emissary Stiles Stilinski, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, McCall pack is already established, Stiles is kind of an asshole, mentions of future Derek/Kira
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-02
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2019-01-08 07:28:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12249762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clotpolesonly/pseuds/clotpolesonly
Summary: Laura had packed up her traumatized brother and what was left of their life and moved as far across the country as they could manage, landing on Scott McCall’s doorstep in California with little more than a few suitcases and a heartfelt plea for sanctuary.That had been two weeks ago. And now Laura was here. Having a breakdown.Scott was every bit as friendly as Satomi had led Laura to believe, smiling at them with dimples and welcoming them to the town, not looking the least bit offended when Derek growled under his breath when anyone got too close to him.No, Scott wasn’t the problem. His emissary was.





	You've Been Burned, Well So Have I

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of the first ideas I had when I started thinking about LHAW, so I'm glad I finally got the time to write it (and by that I mean, I'm glad I managed to procrastinate at work for long enough to get this down on paper, so to speak, lol)!! And yes, Laura's feelings on crying are exactly my feelings because what is writing good for if not projecting your own emotional issues onto your favorite characters, amiright?

Laura hates crying. She hates it more than practically any other physical sensation, pain included. There’s something about how involuntary it is, how it takes you over. You don’t choose when you cry or how hard, and you can’t stop the tears when they decide they want to come out. Crying always makes her feel weaker and more out of control than whatever emotion drove her there to begin with, and she hates it.

But sometimes it’s unavoidable. No matter how hard she fights to keep it in, there’s always a breaking point, and she’s finally reached it. It’s been months,  _months,_  since the last time she’d felt like she couldn’t keep herself together, and now here she is sitting on the dirty concrete sidewalk on a random side street of a city she barely knows, choking on tears and hating literally everything that brought her to this point.

It’s not like she doesn’t have justification for crying, she knows. They’re only a few months out from the fire that took their entire family from them, and she’s been struggling to be the support Derek needs from his sister and his alpha. She’s all he has left. He can’t afford for her to be falling apart right now, especially not when they weren’t sure if the hunters who started the fire were lurking around every corner hoping to finish the job.

That’s why they’d come here. They couldn’t stay back in New York where they’d grown up—not that Laura particularly wanted to, what with the smell of smoke staining the very air there, even if only in her imagination—but they hadn’t known where else to go. A new alpha couldn’t just waltz into any old territory and set up shop, not when practically everywhere was already claimed.

An old family friend, a respected alpha named Satomi, had told her about Beacon Hills. The territory was large and mostly empty, she said, and the pack there was small and notoriously friendly. She’d suggested they might be open to cohabitating.

So Laura had packed up her traumatized brother and what was left of their life and moved as far across the country as they could manage, landing on Scott McCall’s doorstep in California with little more than a few suitcases and a heartfelt plea for sanctuary.

That had been two weeks ago. And now Laura was here. Having a breakdown.

Scott was every bit as friendly as Satomi had led Laura to believe, smiling at them with dimples and welcoming them to the town, not looking the least bit offended when Derek growled under his breath when anyone got too close to him.

Scott wasn’t the problem. His emissary was.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

For all that Scott is friendly and open, Stiles Stilinski is sharp and suspicious. He’s young for an emissary, which makes sense enough considering Scott is young to be an alpha, but even Satomi had sounded grudgingly respectful when she’d mentioned the guy. Satomi had told Laura about some of the threats the McCall pack had faced—kanimas and nogitsunes and feral alphas and all sorts of things that made Laura cringe—and how much of a hand Stiles had had in defeating them.

Stiles is Scott’s right hand man, she’d said, and no one makes it into their territory without his okay.

During their initial meeting, he had stood at Scott’s shoulder with his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed, watching their every move like a particularly bloodthirsty hawk until Laura had actually started sweating from the scrutiny, utterly convinced that she had done something terribly wrong even though she was pretty damn sure she hadn’t. He radiated power in some subtle way that even alpha werewolves didn’t, his brown eyes occasionally flickering to pure white with whatever magic he had swirling around inside him.

And he kept asking questions. He questioned everything Laura said like he was cross-examining her in court, questioned the facts, questioned her motives, questioned her history and her aspirations. It's like he's actively  _trying_  to find some reason to veto Scott’s decision and force them out of the territory.

That can’t happen. They have nowhere else to go and no one else to fall back on. They have to be allowed to stay here or Laura doesn’t know what she'll do. She’s been trying so goddamn hard to placate this guy. She’s jumped through every hoop and answered every question, even the invasive ones he’d had no right to ask. And yet he just kept  _pushing_  and  _accusing_  like somehow she was the villain, like she’d orchestrated her family’s murder just so she could have an excuse to come infiltrate their pack and destroy them from the inside out.

It was ludicrous and Laura has barely slept in weeks and she is so goddamn tired of defending herself from attacks on all sides.

So she cries. And she hates it.

She hates even more that she’s so caught up in losing her shit that she’s actually caught off guard by footsteps coming up behind her; she was an alpha, for god’s sake, and she should’ve heard him coming from a mile away.

“Oh, jeez.”

Of course it’s Stiles. It would have to be Stiles.This wouldn’t be Laura’s life if it had been anyone  _other_  than Stiles to find her like this. Though she supposes he had already known she was a miserable wreck, considering she had run out in the middle of a meeting with him, Scott, Derek and the former emissary. And she’d only run a block or two from the animal clinic Deaton worked at, so the werewolves that had been present at the meeting could undoubtedly still hear her. And isn’t  _that_ humiliating?

Laura wants to tell Stiles to fuck off. She wants to flash her eyes and  _order_  him to go away and leave her alone, but she’s still fucking crying and she doubts it would have any effect on him at all.

She doesn’t look up as Stiles comes up alongside her, just keeps her head buried in her knees and tries to regain some of her shattered composure. She doesn’t even remember what exactly he’d said to set her off like this. Maybe it wasn’t even one thing, just the culmination of weeks and weeks of stress. She realizes all of a sudden that this is the first time she’s cried since long before the fire. God, maybe it’s not even really about him.

Stiles sits down next to her on the sidewalk with a sigh, his long legs sprawling out in front of him. Laura doesn’t acknowledge him. He fidgets for a minute, tapping his thumb on his leg, jiggling his knee, chewing on his tongue. Then he says: 

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

Laura’s disbelieving snort cuts him off. “Save it,” she croaks out; her throat is tight and it sort of hurts to speak. “Why are you even out here?”

Stiles sighs again. He’s a wall of heat at Laura’s side, not close enough to touch but not far enough away to imply that he’s afraid of her in any way. Not like he’s wary enough to be pushing so goddamn hard to get rid of her like he has been.

“Your brother may have threatened to rip my throat out if I didn’t come apologize,” he admits. “With his teeth.”

Laura hits her forehead against her knees and mutters, “Damn it, Derek...”

“No, it’s okay. I deserved that. More than, actually.”

Laura turns her head a bit, not enough to actually face Stiles but enough to shoot him a sidelong look. He’s looking down, watching his own fingers as they tangle together in his lap. His hair is sticking up on one side, like maybe he ran his hands through a time or two. All in all, he looks significantly less intimidating than he usually does. He glances over and catches her looking. The smile he gives her is thin.

“I am sorry,” he says again. “I know I’ve been...”

“A little harsh?” Laura offers when he trails off.

Stiles laughs. “I was gonna say a total dick, actually,” he finishes. “But I guess harsh works too. Probably significantly harsher than is warranted.”

“Then why?” Laura asks, needing to know what compelled him to act like that if he’s  _known_  the whole time how shitty and unfair it is.

Stiles looks at her for a long minute, squinting a bit in the light of the setting sun. Then he turns away, glancing back toward the clinic and the meeting they’d abandoned.

“You may not have noticed,” he says, “but Scott’s a pretty nice and straightforward guy. Always speaks his mind. Always expects everyone else to do the same.”

Laura had noticed that. It had been obvious on the alpha’s face, there in every time he’d looked taken aback at some line of questioning his emissary had brought up, some potential hidden motive Stiles had ferreted out that hadn’t even occurred to him and likely never would’ve. Scott is one of those people who sees the best in everyone.

“Scott has a habit of taking in strays,” Stiles tells her. “And he hasn’t always checked them for fleas before bringing ‘em in the house.”

Laura raises an eyebrow at him. “Dogs? Fleas? Really?”

Stiles rolls his eyes, flapping a hand dismissively. “Whatever, all I’m saying is... Scott trusts everyone, okay? Even when he really shouldn’t. And because Scott trusts everyone, that means that I can’t trust anyone. Because  _one of us_  has to be the skeptic. Otherwise we get kanimas. We get nogitsunes and chimeras. We get childhood friends who claim they want to be a part of your pack and then immediately try to kill you all as soon as they’re accepted into it.”

“So...it’s some kind of fucked up Good Cop, Bad Cop routine you’ve got going on here?” Laura asks.

Stiles huffs out another weak laugh. “Yeah, I guess you could call it that,” he says. “I’m an ass, okay? I know that. I’m paranoid and hyper-vigilant and if it were up to me, I’d probably roll the entire pack in bubble wrap and never let them out of the house again. But I can’t do that, so I have to settle for grilling everyone who comes near them to within an inch of their life and hoping I root out the bad guys before they can strike.”

And Laura hates how much that makes sense to her. She hates that she feels the same way about Derek and would go to exactly the same lengths. She hates that she can’t even blame Stiles for being such a hardass.

She rubs her hands over her cheeks, scrubbing away the wetness, and sniffs.

“So have I passed your inspection?” she asks. “Do you trust me yet? What more do I have to do?”

Stiles tugs at his hair, fingers sliding through the gelled strands until they turned into spikes that stuck out at odd angles.

“If it makes you feel any better, according to everyone else you passed a long time ago,” he says with a little shrug. “I just have issues. Trusting people is...hard. Really hard, for me, after some of the shit we’ve been through. It’s always a risk, and we’ve been burned before.”

Laura laughs. She fucking  _laughs._  It’s a little hysterical and it brings with it a few more tears, but she laughs until her stomach hurts and keeps laughing because she just can’t help it.

It takes a minute for Stiles to realize. The dawning horror on his face only makes her laugh harder.

“Oh my god,” he says flatly. “I just said that. Yup, I most certainly did. And the award for the most tactless and insensitive word choice in the history of ever goes to  _me._ "

Laura’s laughing too hard to respond. She just nods her head as best she can, gasping for breath and hoping she doesn’t look as much like a dying seal as she thinks she does.

Eventually Stiles starts chuckling too. “Ya know, I gotta applaud you for your morbid sense of humor,” he says.

Laura fights down another wave of inappropriate hilarity, wiping at her eyes yet again. She prefers these kinds of tears, no matter how miserable the joke that put them there.

“It’s either laugh or cry,” she says, “and I really hate crying.”

“Well, I’m sorry I put you through it.” Stiles hoists himself back onto his feet and reaches a hand back down to Laura. “Let me make it up to you?”

“How do you plan to do that?” Laura asks, eyeing the hand with just a little bit of reluctance. Not as much as she thought she’d feel, but then this version of Stiles—the version that’s not treating like her a criminal—is actually pretty nice.

“Well, for starters, I thought I’d hook your brother up with Kira,” Stiles says brightly. He doesn’t retract his offered hand. “She is literally the sweetest, kindest, most gentle ball of sunshine on the planet. I definitely caught him looking at her a few days ago and she was definitely looking back. I don’t know about you, but I think she’d be really good for him.”

That plan actually has merit. Laura remembers meeting Kira at a pack function they’d attended on a probationary basis the week before and the girl had been all smiles and apologies and good-natured rambling. She had gotten a smile out of Derek that Laura hadn’t seen in a long time.

Laura bites her lip, squinting up at Stiles. “Okay. And what else?” Because he isn’t getting off that easy, not after what he’s put her through.

Stiles laughs like he’s delighted that Laura’s giving him a hard time. He ducks his head and rubs at the back of his neck.

“You could, uh...let me take you out for coffee sometime?” he says, a lopsided smile on his face that is somehow both sweet and mischievous at the same time.

Laura stares up at him. “As a date?” she asks, not quite as surprised as she thinks she should be.

Stiles shrugs. “Or just an apology. That’s up to you.”

After a moment of careful thought, Laura finally reaches up to take Stiles’ hand. She lets him pull her to her feet. They’re almost of a height. She’s not sure why she never noticed that before. She looks him in the eye now, stares him down until he starts squirming a bit. That’s when she smiles.

“Ask me again next week,” she says, already turning back toward the clinic. “And don’t be a dick in the meantime.”

He’s quick to follow her.


End file.
